I have to issue a mea culpa: Almost exactly three years ago, I reported on a performance improvement update for the excellent indie RPG Dread Delusion. The performance was improved, but it was not improved enough. After my initial excitement, I found the game’s inconsistent framerates unbearably brutal, and I exclusively played on desktop.
But not anymore. Dread Delusion finally, for realsies, my hand to god, actually runs great on Steam Deck now: A rock solid 60 fps in my experience, at both the start of the game and a save dozens of hours in. It also boasts some blessedly gentle battery usage: Over four hours estimated playtime, with a tick rate on the percentage to back that up.
The new update largely brings over fixes and improvements from the recent console release of Dread Delusion, and I’m guessing that its Switch 2 port in particular is to thank for the game’s night and day Steam Deck experience. As much as I am a pathetic little seething hater of Nintendo’s wildly successful new portable, I would like to extend my gratitude nonetheless.
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Last summer, when I began a new playthrough of this first person, mini open world RPG, I fired Dread Delusion up on Steam Deck to get a consistent 25 fps in the starting area, despite developer Lovely Hellplace’s early optimizations, and no amount of fiddling with settings resulted in anything I found pleasant enough to supplant the desktop experience. Factor of Games’ May 2023 performance showcase is fairly illustrative, as is this Steam forum thread from last year about DD’s Deck performance.
In my limited playtime after Dread Delusion’s April 15 patch, I have yet to encounter frame rate dips outside a slight hang when loading a new area or autosaving—it feels like I could set my watch to this game’s frame rate on Steam Deck. I never finished the replay I started last year, but now I see a route to the end credits unchained from my desk.
Developer Lovely Hellplace is currently working on a follow-up game, and it looks sick: Entropy, a more JRPG-style experience that builds on Dread Delusion’s distinctive art style and presentation. If you’re wondering why you should play Dread Delusion, it has some of my favorite RPG quests ever, including “The Ethics of Eating Flesh,” a twisty moral dilemma over the human meat substitute sustaining a society of sentient zombies that feels like a sci-fi short story from the 1970s.
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